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From what I can tell, marketing and those sorts of things just seem to be way outside of the grasp of the poker minded.

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There's a couple major issues not making sense with this year's WSOP in this vein.

1) Why is there going to be a four month wait for the Championship table to be shown on TV, one with the biggest cash prize in "sports" history?

2) To me, with ~$62 million in prize money total, why isn't $10,000,000 for first place being considered? I'm sure the "poker minded", as you put it, wouldn't want 15-16% of such a big pool going for one place, but this is where the marketing aspect comes in.

On point one, sure, Raymer's win wasn't shown until 3-4 months later, and WPT's turnaround for it's Championship table (for this year) will be 2 1/2 months, but I feel at this juncture, for TV coverage of poker to be advanced a bit further, and for marketing purposes, the aspect of showing a short-handed final table (my number, at 4), live, ala Turning Stone, should be strongly considered with such a large prize on the line.

Security concerns can be taken care of by having a delay (like TS did). Scheduling concerns are easy with the way things are setup right now. Go from 9 to 4 on Friday, take Saturday off, go live on Sunday to decide the champ.

There's also the angle of the World Series of Poker, the proclaimed "greatest and most important tournament(s) in the world", needing to market itself as such - if it's the greatest and most important, in this day and age, why aren't there going to be daily and/or weekly updates? Showing the final tables of the prelim tournaments later on is fine, but the WSOP and ESPN should be doing what it can with the history imbedded in the name to differentiate the WSOP from every other poker show on TV, especially WPT.

The decision to show primarily HE Final Tables, to me, was a major mis-step - where's the Razz? 2-7 TD? The $10K Pot Omaha? How about taking the chance and show one Stud 8 and Omaha 8 Final Table? Why'd the mixed games tourney get nixed? Some of these tables may initially bomb ratings-wise, but it's a risk/reward situation where if one of the other games catches on, then WSOP can take credit for having the initiative to show other poker games on TV, rather than falling in line like lemmings, bent on driving the HE trend into the ground.

As for point two, it's given that 1st doubled from 2.5 to 5 while the field tripled, but again, for marketing purposes, and with so much money available, $10,000,000 rolls off the tounge and visually is a much more solid number than $7,000,000, or $8,000,000, or $9,000,000 - even $7,500,000, which most would say is the logical number. $10,000,000 has a bigger visual presence.

And that proposed prize structure is just plain goofy. $500K at 16-18 is what throws things out of whack. $500K at 10-12 with a more evenly laid out ascension of the prize money makes things fit better. The >$200K jumps should be starting at 10 going into the final table, not at 28 going into 27 and then minimalizing the jumps until 10 to 9. Horrible. I could probably whip up something better based on 6600.